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There’s a new club and it has only one member: Apple.
The tech giant on Thursday became the first public U.S. company to reach a valuation of $1 trillion.
Just to spell that out: $1,000,000,000,000.
Amazon has been close behind Apple in the race to the one trillion dollar mark, surpassing $900 billion market value in July, but a strong earnings report on Tuesday pushed Apple over the mark.
Apple was founded in the garage of co-founder Steve Jobs in 1976 when personal computers were in their infancy. Along with co-founder Steve Wozniak, Jobs began steering the industry toward devices that would appeal to consumers, culminating in the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
Along the way, Apple has launched a series of products that changed the ways people use technology. It popularized the computer mouse and the graphical user interface, which is now ubiquitous, and it altered music-listening habits with its iPod and accompanying digital music store, iTunes.
The company almost went bankrupt in the late 1990s. It had failed to continue making popular products after Jobs left the company in 1985 amid a dispute with the company’s then-CEO. Jobs returned in 1997 and accepted a $150 million investment from rival Microsoft.
Jobs was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, where he thanked Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and said “the world’s a better place” after the investment.
Apple went on to change the way the world listens to music and in 2007, came out with perhaps the biggest gamechanger of all: the iPhone.
The bulk of Apple’s revenue comes from selling hardware, particularly iPhones. As growth in smartphones sales has begun to slow and some consumers have turned to cheaper devices from other manufacturers, analysts had begun to question whether Apple would be able to hit the trillion mark.
But recent strength from one of Apple’s smaller services business, which includes the App Store, helped convince investors to push the company’s stock higher, said Daniel Ives, head of technology research at GBH Insights, a market research firm.
“This is a historic milestone not just for Apple but the overall tech sector as Cook & Co. hit the elusive trillion dollar market cap club,” Ives said. “The services business has been the high octane fuel in Apple’s engine and got the company to this trillion dollar valuation quicker than many had thought with a major iPhone product cycle on the horizon.”